Pages tagged “sitges”

Sitges Film Festival 2009: A Q&A with Tom Six About His Barf-Bag Classic, The Human Centipede

By Steve Dollar on 11:05 AM on November 10, 2009

Every year at the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic in Sitges, Spain, there’s one movie that generates instant notoriety. In previous years, gore-drenched European shockers like Inside and Martyrs have prompted more than gasps from audiences. People flee the theater, get sick to their stomachs, even require a trip to the emergency room. Or so goes the legend.... read more

Found in: Blogs, Festivus

Sitges Film Festival 2009: Amer, The Loved Ones, Doghouse, More

By Steve Dollar on 6:00 PM on November 6, 2009

What you do in Sitges, Spain, during the annual Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic, is pretty much this: Wake up at 7:30 a.m. Eat breakfast. Hit first movie at 8:30 a.m. Continue throughout day. Break for late-afternoon nap, snack, interview or hang in the lobby bar of the Hotel Melia. Go see more movies. Go to dinner. Go drinking. See a movie (maybe). Go to the late-night party that usually begins after 1 a.m. Get back to room about 4:30 a.m. (with luck). Wake up at 7:30 a.m. And repeat. For seven or eight days straight. If your eyeballs haven’t... read more

Found in: Blogs, Festivus, Film Festival

Sitges Film Festival 2009: Paranormal Activity, [REC] 2, The Descent 2

By Steve Dollar on 12:00 PM on October 30, 2009

Once more into the breach, horror fans! This year’s Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic in Sitges, a charming coastal resort town a half-hour south of Barcelona, was the jump-scare capital of the world for the first half of October. The 42nd annual fest is a whirring vertiginous hypno-wheel of psycho-head blowouts, paranormal activity, zombie-stomping and dangerous visions—and not all of them are entirely confined to the screen.... read more

Found in: Blogs, Festivus

Sitges Film Festival 2008: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

By Steve Dollar on 1:00 PM on October 23, 2008

[Above: Lina Leandersson in Let the Right One In]Another 10 days at the world’s leading festival for fantastic cinema have come to a close. All the extraterrestrials have phoned home. And the zombies are in repose until next October. Despite very late nights drinking with actors, filmmakers, distributors and programmers from Finland, Colombia, Korea, Japan, Ireland, Australia, France, Canada, New York and, of course, Spain, I managed to see 23 or 25 or 27 movies, often sleeping on my feet, so that the whole experience began to feel like an endless reel.... read more

Found in: Blogs, Festivus, Film Festival

Sitges Film Festival 2008: Ferrara on the Rocks

By Steve Dollar on 12:30 PM on October 13, 2008

[Above: William Burroughs and Andy Warhol in Chelsea on the Rocks]Within the “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” mythology of New York City, the Chelsea Hotel has always held a unique spot as a haven for misfits, bohemians and vagabond geniuses. Even as the rest of Manhattan gentrified and Disneyfied, the 12-story building at 222 East 23rd Street—a hotel since 1905—held its ground, its rooms occupied by everyone from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan, Sid Vicious to Julian Schnabel, Arthur Miller to Courtney Love. It’s a cultural landmark of the feverish demimonde that has made... read more

Found in: Blogs, Festivus, Film Festival

Sitges Film Festival 2008: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

By Steve Dollar on 12:00 PM on October 9, 2008

All that is mondo melts into Sitges. Brain-eating zombies! Samurai assassins! Spooky children with spookier smiles! Post-apocalyptic clones! Robot monsters! Naked babes! Dead naked babes! Dead naked babes that bite!... read more

Found in: Blogs, Festivus, Film Festival